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A Summer Home in New York: Some Like It Hot

By spending summers in her apartment on the Upper East Side, Marcie Chasen escapes the even hotter weather at home in Florida. Among her many pastimes: catching up with friends over a meal, going to shows on Broadway and dropping in on street fairs.Credit
Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

During the sweltering summer months, many affluent people flee Manhattan for the Berkshires, the Hamptons, the Jersey Shore — anywhere they won’t melt. After all, the city’s busy streets and climbing skyline do not call to mind the traditional joys of summer: long, sunny days on the sand and in the surf, star-laden nights lighted by campfires and fireflies, the smells of freshly cut grass and slightly singed marshmallows.

Yet while Manhattanites fight traffic to get out of the city, a rare breed of part-timer is breezing in from the other direction. In something of a reverse migration, these summertime city dwellers trade their retreats near the beach, lake or mountains for pieds-à-terre and long-term rentals in Manhattan, tolerating the heat, humidity and pungent warm-weather smells in exchange for a more laid-back New York.

Here they find everything from open parking spots to prime tables at hot restaurants, as well as streets and parks brimming with outdoor events and plenty of air-conditioned museums and shops.

Marcie Chasen, a former actress and singer from Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., who also owns a market research firm, has been summering in the city for the last decade. While escaping from Florida’s soaring temperatures, she catches up with old friends and, these days, visits her son at Fordham Law School.

“Even though the weather gets hot here,” she said, “it’s not the same as Florida.”

As soon as the mercury begins to rise, Ms. Chasen, who is 58 and semiretired, closes up her 3,000-square-foot condo in Palm Beach Gardens and moves to a 600-square-foot one-bedroom on the Upper East Side. She bought the place in 2009 for about $500,000, after renting in the neighborhood for several summers. Except for a couple of weeks when she leaves town to visit her sister in Colorado, she remains here until September.

“I have a whole gang of friends,” said Ms. Chasen, who lived in Manhattan for 27 years, mostly on the Upper East Side, before moving to Florida about 17 years ago. “Now it’s like all my peeps — it’s all Jewish women my age.”

“We go to rooftop bars all over the city,” she added, rattling off some her favorite pastimes, like going to shows on Broadway and at Lincoln Center Out of Doors, shopping at street fairs, walking in Central Park and sitting in outdoor cafes. “I love the whole ambience.”

Millions of tourists visit Manhattan every summer for short vacations. “It’s the best time to be here because the locals are gone,” said Kitt Garrett, the chief executive of Discover New York and Beyond, a travel specialist based in Manhattan. “It’s so much easier to get restaurant reservations and go through the museums with less people and enjoy a Broadway show. The traffic is less. I just dread September, when they all come back.”

Tom DeSantis, a retired tech entrepreneur, visited the city many times over the years, mostly staying in hotels. In 2008 he bought a one-bedroom in a new high-rise near Madison Square Park.

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So where is everybody? When heat thins the ranks of city dwellers, summer-only residents move in, drawn by the emptier sidewalks, museums and restaurants but still-lively vibe.Credit
Damon Winter/The New York Times

“It’s an entirely different experience,” said Mr. DeSantis, who also has a waterfront condominium in the South Beach neighborhood of Miami, where he spends the winter, and a condo in Cleveland on Lake Erie, where he keeps a boat. “Having your own place creates a different social dynamic.”

In May he celebrated his 58th birthday by having 12 people over to his apartment for a dinner party. “In a hotel,” he said, “it wouldn’t be the same.”

On a typical summer day, Mr. DeSantis, an avid cyclist, takes a long bike ride around the tip of Manhattan, or up the West Side Highway to the George Washington Bridge and back. He might catch a matinee on a Wednesday, which he notes is “usually the easiest time to get good tickets for a reduced price via broadwaybox.com.” Or he’ll grab a late-night burger and beer at the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park. “If you get there around 10:30,” he said, “you’ll avoid long lines, and sitting in their outdoor dining area is like being at a German beer garden.”

If the heat becomes unbearable, Mr. DeSantis hops a flight to Cleveland to spend the weekend on his boat and visit family and friends. “My door-to-door travel time is three hours,” he said, “about the same as most of the typical NYC region summer escapes.”

Michelle Wendt, a writer and producer from Los Angeles, has transplanted her family to New York each summer for the past several years. For her, summering in the city is about reconnecting with a place she loves and exposing her children, Olivia, almost 15, and Leo, 7, to the East Coast vibe. The family was accustomed to spending Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve in Manhattan, but Ms. Wendt wanted to cultivate a stronger connection to the city than a holiday vacation allowed.

“It’s not just about us having an extended vacation,” said Ms. Wendt, who grew up in Connecticut and Shaker Heights, Ohio, and visited Manhattan often with her parents. “My daughter and son are making real friendships there. They have New York pediatricians. I belong to a social club. We have New York play dates. It’s really investing in having a whole New York life going on.”

Five years ago, they spent a couple of weeks at a friend’s apartment in SoHo. The next year, they rented another friend’s place in West New York, N.J., for a month, but found the commute cumbersome.

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The following summer, they paid about $6,000 a month for a short-term rental in the East Village, where they visited Japanese markets and various galleries. But they frequently headed uptown for the Public Theater’s Free Shakespeare in the Park series, Lincoln Center’s Midsummer Night Swing, and other family-oriented events.

It wasn’t until Edward F. Johnston III, a broker at Brown Harris Stevens and a good friend of Ms. Wendt’s, said, “Oh, just rent full time already,” that they put down more permanent, albeit part-time, roots.

The family is spending a second summer in a one-bedroom walk-up on the Upper East Side that they rent year-round for about $2,000 a month. “Right now we have a great big bed and a pullout,” said Ms. Wendt, who put about $20,000 into renovating the apartment to ensure it felt like home.

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Tom DeSantis, center, has a home in Florida and an apartment and many friends in New York, where he summers near Madison Square Park. If the weather gets too warm here, he takes a break at his condo on Lake Erie.Credit
Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

Her husband, Brett Berman, who practices family law in Los Angeles, bounces between the Manhattan apartment and their three-bedroom house in West Hollywood. After their three-year lease is up, they plan to look for a larger two-bedroom rental.

Ms. Wendt has rented an office in the meatpacking district for her production company, partly with the aim of creating a bicoastal existence for her family. Her daughter attends a theater camp nearby. Her son goes to a day camp that includes museum visits and outings in Central Park.

“One of my favorite things,” Ms. Wendt said, “is to get on the street with the kids and take a walk. We hardly walk in L.A.”

Occasionally, the family visits friends in the Hamptons or, to spice things up, checks into a Manhattan hotel for the weekend.

Most people, Ms. Wendt said, are perplexed by her choice of summer retreat. “L.A. natives don’t really know enough about the East Coast to make heads or tails of it. My New York friends say, ‘What, are you crazy?’ ”

Ms. Chasen, who trades Palm Beach Gardens for Manhattan each summer, often meets with a similar reaction. Barbara Kessler, a broker at Douglas Elliman and a close friend, said, “She’s the only one I know that would be here for summer.”

But sometimes, even when it’s hot enough in the city to fry eggs on the sidewalk, the country leaves something to be desired.

Although they have a second home in the rural Connecticut village of Washington Depot, Deana Concilio-Lenz, a video producer and interior designer, and her husband, Chris Lenz, a creative-marketing executive, prefer capitalizing on the Great Summertime Migration out of Manhattan to listening to the crickets.

“I do like the relaxation part of the country,” Ms. Concilio-Lenz said. “I am also afraid of the ticks.”

So, with little regret, she and Mr. Lenz rent out the 1940s Cape-style house during the peak summer months and remain in Manhattan with their two children. The rental income covers the mortgage for a few months, and they can take advantage of the quieter city for bike rides in the park, trips to museums and nights out listening to jazz.

They begin visiting the Connecticut house again in the fall, when the summer crowds have subsided, the leaves change colors, the weather is cooler and the bug population has diminished.